Memories of Dreams
by fwoom
Summary: An AU story about Fye and Kurogane taking place in the world of Chobits. Originally written for the 2008 kuroxfai comm Spring Challenge.
1. Chapter 1

Syaoran had never been to Tokyo before.

He was not a city child. Suburbs, small towns, plenty of grass nearby and rivers and trees glinting gold in the sunlight, places where every person knew every other person by sight, where people saw him passing and shouted, "Ho, Syaoran-kun! How does Fujitaka-san today?" those were the places for him. Not this. Not the swirling, the noises, the black masses of people that were not people, people that flooded streets like a tide and swept past without ever turning back – and the buildings! What monsters of concrete, steel, titanium, rising so high to block out the sun! And between those colossal beings, in the tiny cracks of shade they left between them, the people flocked to and fro like scurrying ants.

Amidst all this, Syaoran stood. In raggedy clothes, barefooted, and clutching his blue saddle bag, he was painfully aware of how out of place he seemed, yet he schooled himself to keep his face calm. Horns honked, cars screeched, people thronged. Exhaling slowly, he turned and slipped into the flow of the crowd, melting into them like a drop of sweat on a hot sunny day.

One thing good about the city was that people did not see you, he reflected as he walked along. All around him the crowds surged, their shoulders brushing him in passing yet not a one giving him more a glance than they would a piece of brick. So many foreign faces, all chattering amongst their own groups of two, three, five, oblivious to the world around them.

Syaoran also noticed the persocoms.

Fujitaka-san had warned him about them, but he had not expected them to be so… humanoid. He had wondered about the people with strange, robotic looking devices over their ears, but dismissed them as fashion statements or some trend he was not aware of until he saw one girl asking her persocom for directions. He had stopped and stood very still, and his eyes had flashed and whirled as whatever electronic messages processed itself inside him, then he said, "This is the wrong street. The building you seek is located 5 streets down in the southeastern direction, roughly one kilometer from here." The girl groaned. Then as his eyes went back to normal they continued down the street, talking and laughing as though nothing had happened. And no one gave them a second glance.

And Syaoran began to notice that this was happening all over the place. Through the whirl of activity people were asking their persocoms to look up something for them, to check their email, to relate a message from their phone, all integrated seamlessly into the flow of natural conversation and city life. And he began to wonder how many of the people passing by breathed with real flesh and real blood, and how many more merely pretended to do so, electronic currents flowing through their computerized minds.

Finding the place was easy. Tokyo was a city full of signs. High, low, near, far, twisted loopy and upside-down, there glinted the signs. It made Syaoran glad Fujitaka-san had taught him how to read.

The apartment was located in a remote sector of the city, to Syaoran's relief. The doors were a coarse grey rimmed with white, and he let out a big sigh as they swung shut behind him. He took a moment to let the noises of the city fade away, shut out by the ancient grey doors, then looked down at his slip of paper. Top floor.

There was only one door there when he stepped out of the elevator, so he knocked.

The door clicked, then eased open. Syaoran peered cautiously in.

"Hello there," came a voice from his left, tinged with hints of a smile. Syaoran started. The door swung open and Syaoran found himself looking up at a lanky figure dressed in a sports jacket and stylish pants bearing a winged design Syaoran had never seen before. The man had white-blond hair and eyes as blue as the summer sky, and Syaoran found himself wondering what he was doing in Japan.

"Hello," he responded, still looking up at the figure. A blue earring glinted on one of the man's earlobes.

"May I ask your…?" the man hesitated. Syaoran suddenly realized he had not yet introduced himself.

"I'm Syaoran," he supplied hastily. "From Fujitaka-san," he added as explanation. "He says he has something for you."

"Ah, you come from Fujitaka Kinomoto." A light dawned in the blue eyes. Then it was all smiles and pleasantry again. "Do come in!"

Syaoran obliged, stepping into the apartment suite. It was larger than he had expected it to be, but impeccably clean. A small round table stood off to one side, a couch to the other, and half of the kitchen was just visible past the place where you would expect a television to be. Syaoran was just craning his head to see more when he was surprised by a gruff voice behind him.

"What's this kid doing here?" the voice growled.

Syaoran spun around to find another man glaring down on him, jaws set, arms crossed. He had jet black hair and – Syaoran noticed – red eyes.

"Kurogane…" the lanky figure seemed troubled. He ran a hand despairingly through his hair. "Won't you go inside for a moment?"

"_No_," said Kurogane. "Why is he here? Why did you let him in?"

"It's for…" the man started to speak, then checked himself. "I just need to talk to him about something. Just give us a moment."

"I'm not going in until you tell me what you have to talk about!" snapped Kurogane. He tilted his chin up and raised his eyes to the ceiling, obviously not planning to yield. Syaoran wondered how his eyes had come to be so red. Were they born that way? Did something happen to them once? Maybe it was just a trick of the light.

The other man cast his blue eyes down reluctantly and bit his lip. Then he said, "He comes from Fujitaka-san."

"Who's Fujitaka-san?" Kurogane demanded. "I've never heard of him before."

A spark of pain flashed across the blue eyes. "Someone," muttered the blond.

"Like who?" growled Kurogane. With two quick steps he crossed the distance between them, nearly pinning the other man back against the wall. "Why don't I know about him?" he hissed into the other man's ear.

Syaoran found this entire scene very uncomfortable and wasn't sure what to make of himself. "Stop it…" he heard the blond say in a strangled whisper. One of Kurogane's hands had gone around him and was now roughly clasping his back, and they seemed to be getting closer and closer to each other. The lanky man seemed completely helpless, pinned to the wall as he was, and Syaoran inherently felt that he should do something but didn't know what. Their lips were getting closer and closer, almost brushing now, and the blond half-closed his eyes…

And that was when Kurogane swayed, then sank to the ground lifelessly, landing with a soft thump.

"He'll be all right in a while," the lanky man told Syaoran shakily as they walked out of the bedroom. "This is a recurring problem of his. Don't worry about it."

The two of them had somehow between them managed to drag Kurogane's bulk into the bedroom and deposit him on the bed. Syaoran could not help noticing that there was only one bed in the room.

"What's wrong with him?" he asked, just to fill up the void of conversation.

"He has… amnesia," the blond man replied, and again Syaoran saw despair in his eyes. "It comes and goes. And he has those fainting spells. Normally he's not like this."

Amnesia. Syaoran thought back on the earlier conversation and wondered how this man ihad/i come to know Fujitaka-san. Who knows, perhaps Kurogane's suspicions had some merit. Certainly Fujitaka-san had never mentioned him to Syaoran before.

"Oh, I nearly forgot!" he said, starting. "I have…" he stopped. Where was his blue saddle bag? Ah, there, on that chair. "I have something…" he grabbed the saddle bag and began sifting through its contents. "…something… for you!" He flourished a white container triumphantly. It had, he suddenly noticed, the same winged design on it as the one on the stylish pants. "I don't know what's in it," he added, "but it's what Fujitaka-san told me to give to you."

"Ah," said the blond. His blue eyes gleamed. "Thank you."

Syaoran got out of the subway and began heading towards home, questions still echoing through his mind.

"He's a genius," Minoru had said. "The smartest bloody man I've ever met in my whole life. He's also crazy as a sack full of ferrets."

On the way out he had pressed L1 instead of L by accident, and the elevator took him to the basement. And, as if that weren't bad enough, the elevator had jammed.

Syaoran had had to try and make his way across the basement in the dark, without the least idea where the stairs might be and without a single light to guide him.

The basement had been full of wires and old boxes and computer chips and god knows what else hidden in the shadowy blackness, all stacked high as a man's head and covered with the dust of decades. Out of nowhere in the dark a big muffin creature had popped out at him, nearly killing him for a heart attack, and then kept bouncing around him cheerfully and going "Mokona! Mokona! Mokona!" at every turn until Syaoran was ready to kick it. Honestly, had those two not stumbled upon him he did not think he ever would have found his way out.

It was the girl who came down first. "Hello?" she called, voice reverberating through the darkness.

"Hello!" shouted Syaoran, nearly tripping in his excitement. "Hello, don't go, I'm down here!"

"Oh, there _is_ someone!" she exclaimed. Then she called, "Hold on just a moment, I'll get a light!"

"Who is it, Yuzuki?" Another voice, farther away.

"I don't know," said the girl, "but _someone's_ there."

The light revealed a tallish girl with long brown braids, smiling warmly, and next to her…

"Before you ask, yes, I'm in middle school," said the boy.

"I wasn't going to ask," said Syaoran.

"Ah, well, people usually do, so I thought I'd forestall you," said the boy.

That was how he met Minoru.

It turns out Minoru was also there to visit Fye D. Flourite, which was the name of the man Syaoran had just visited. He had come down to see what was wrong because the elevator light blinked L1 no matter how many times the "up" button was pressed.

They chatted. Syaoran found he got along with Minoru very well, despite his apparent impassivity to everything around him. Apparently people were always surprised to find out Minoru was in middle school because he was a persocom expert and people did not expect middle schoolers to be persocom experts.

"I design custom persocoms," he had said, offhandishly. "I'm pretty good at it."

"Oh?" asked Syaoran.

"…but not as good as Fye."

Syaoran had not wanted to go back up, because he felt Fye and Kurogane would want some time alone, and because the elevator was still broken and he did not want to climb the stairs. So he said his goodbyes to Minoru and Kaede and turned to leave. Minoru called him back and left him a phone number. He also told him to look up "M" on the BBS network when he had time, and Syaoran decided not to tell Minoru that he had no idea what a network was, much less BBS.

So they parted.

The grass and the trees were a welcome relief. So were the people greeting him on the streets, in the quiet little town where Syaoran lived, but Syaoran was too preoccupied to pause and chat with them. Instead, he hurried back to the little house where he lived with Fujitaka-san, his adopted father.

"Syaoran!" said Fujitaka Kinomoto, when he saw him come in. "I made a huge leap in the northern excavation site while you were gone—ah, how was Tokyo?"

Syaoran was silent a moment. Then he raised his head and looked straight at his stepfather. "What did you ask me to bring to that man?" he asked. "What was in that box?"

"Ah," said Fujitaka. He knit his brows in thought and for a second the room was shrouded in silence. Then he smiled that old familiar smile and his eyes crinkled at the edges and Syaoran felt warmth flood through him. Suddenly he knew he was home again and felt very, very tired. "Come," suggested Fujitaka gently, "why don't you tell me of your adventures first?"

Syaoran complied. How could he not?

After he did, Fujitaka went outside and looked up at the sky a long while, as if deep in thought. When he came back in he handed Syaoran a jacket and told him to follow him.

"Come," he said. "I have something to show you."

Syaoran followed, draped in the warm jacket, head stuffed full of Tokyo and winged patterns and mysteries. They walked far, way into the hills and the forests where Fujitaka had always forbidden him from going before. In the sky the birds sang and the wind hummed and moonlight peered tremulously down through the leaves to light the ground below.

"How far are we going?" he wanted to ask, but some impulse held the question back from his tongue. They made their way through the woods silently, step by step, enjoying the breeze and the moon and the chill night air.

Syaoran did not know how long they walked, but presently they came to a cemetery. Small, forgotten, in the middle of nowhere, it stood next to what might have once been a town but has long since crumbled into ashes and bricks and vine, burnt or earthquaked or hurricaned god knows how many years ago.

Fujitaka took him through the middle of the cemetery and stopped. Still they did not speak. They did not need to. On the tombstone in front of them, embellished with the same winged design that Syaoran had seen on the box, were engraved the words:

_Kurogane Suwa_


	2. Chapter 2

Fye sat in front of the round table in his apartment, chin propped on his hands. The white box lay before him, smoothed and rounded at the edges, adorned with the trademark winged design. Fujitaka Kinomoto had sent this to him.

Fye did not know what was inside the box, but instinctively sensed that it marked the end of something, something that he had known for a long time but could not quite remember. He did not open it, because he felt certain that once he did he _would _remember, and he could not do that, no. Yet he could feel it already; shadows, dark currents, nipping at the edge of his memory, just waiting for the right trigger, a crack of space, to all come rushing back in. For too long they had lain dormant, for too long he had pushed them away. Forget, forget, forget. Go back to the dark crevasses of the mind, the cobwebby corners that no one visits and never will, go back down into the shadows and never come back.

Yet he could not just leave it. Fujitaka Kinomoto had sent this to him, and expected him to open it. Sooner or later he would have to open it. But how could he?

Fye sat, chin on his hands, and gazed at the little white box. It was so pretty. So pretty, so white, so innocent-

A hand landed on his shoulder from behind.

"Awake, Kuro-rin?" He spoke without turning around.

"What are you doing?" asked Kurogane. There was no rancor in his voice. "Where did this box come from?"

Amnesia. Always amnesia, from the very beginning amnesia. Memories shoved away into the crevasses of his own mind, memories Kurogane remembered and did not remember, memories gone, swept away in the zap of an electric circuit. Amnesia. Always.

"Oh, just something I found in the mail," he replied, not bothering to point out they had not received any mail for the past ten years.

"Ah," said Kurogane. Then, gruffly, "Hey, you all right?"

Fye swept to his feet and spun to face Kurogane. His blue earring glittered briefly as it caught the light.

"No," he said succinctly. "I'm not."

The sudden heat of Kurogane's body next to him was comforting. So was the breath of the other man's voice in his ear; harsh, with the tiniest twinge of sarcasm. "What have you done to yourself now, idiot?"

"Nothing," Fye murmured, pressing himself into the reassuring warmth. All at once a sharp jab of desolation hit him so hard it was all he could do to keep from gasping. It wasn't real, nothing was real, Kurogane only behaved like that because he _wanted _him to, it could never be real, _ever_, and the despair burned a red-hot trail inside of him, scorching his breath, his lungs, his heart; he felt such a wave of revulsion that he nearly thrust Kurogane from him, but the lure of familiar warmth stopped his hand. He could not let it go. And why should he? It was, after all, all he had left…

"Come," he sighed, a dream, the last puff of a dandelion on a fine sunny day. He had forgotten. Or perhaps the memories had been pushed screaming off the side of a cliff, fallen fifty feet to dangle against the edge of an overhanging branch, lonely and small and abandoned. "Let us-" this coupled with a disarming smile, "-go inside."

Kurogane's growl of assent was at once outrageous and endearing.

One more time, Fye promised himself as they drifted towards the bedroom. He needed to feel the realness, the rawness of Kurogane's body, one last time. Needed to etch it forever into his memory.

Then he would open the box, and take whatever Fujitaka had in store for him.

+

They met long, long ago, when Fye was ten and Kurogane was eleven. Fye had just moved into the town with his mother and did not know anybody. Kurogane was the first person he bumped into, one day in the hills behind the house. He had simply been exploring when-

"What are you doing in _my _forest?" demanded a little boy, dropping out of a tree to land in front of him. His eyes flashed red.

"Nobody can own the forest," Fye pointed out. "'s public property."

The little boy thought about this, hands on his hips. An oversized black shirt fluttered in the wind behind him. It might have looked impressive had he not been so small.

"Fine," he conceded presently. "What's your name?"

"Fye," said Fye, and gave a friendly shrug.

The boy opposite him tilted his head, considering this blond-haired novelty. Fye was not like anyone he had ever seen before, with blue, blue eyes like ripples of light reflected off a lake on a sunny day.

Fye waited several moments more, then prompted, "And you?"

The boy gave a start and blinked, coming back to himself.

"I'm-" it took another second for the question to sink in. "I'm Kurogane," he affirmed, tossing his small head of black back.

Fye was delighted.

"So you're Kuro-chan!" he exclaimed. At the other boy's expression, he amended, "Maybe Kuro-tan? Or Kuro-rin? Or Kuro-puu?"

"No!" snapped Kurogane, face flushing. "Stop it!"

"Kuro-mi?" suggested Fye. "Kuro-pi?"

Kurogane was completely red now, and the whole of his small frame seemed to swell with his indignation. "It's Kuro_gane_," he huffed, then turned his back. "I'm not talking to you anymore," he announced. "Whoever you are," he added bitterly.

"It's Fye," said Fye, unperturbed. "Why are your eyes red?"

Kurogane spun back around faster than you could say "hey," unconsciously shifting into a fighting stance.

"They're naturally red," he growled. "You got a problem with that?"

Fye thought about it for a while, then shrugged.

"No," he said.

Kurogane eyed him suspiciously. Fye waited for him to speak, but after several moments it became clear he was not planning to, and Fye felt obliged to say something to ease the awkwardness. So he did.

"Let's be friends!"

Kurogane opened his mouth, then snapped it shut again. There was a brief moment of silence as each regarded the other, red eyes narrowed and suspicious, blue eyes flashing and curious. Finally, Kurogane decided that the stranger opposite him had passed the test.

"Okay," he said.

+

They turned out to be next-door neighbors. Fye's mother had bought the largest house in the vicinity in which to set up her laboratory, and Kurogane's parents owned the second largest house right across from it.

Mrs. Suwa, smiling and slight and beautiful, leaned down to brush her slender fingers across Fye's cheekbones.

"Well, what have we here?" she asked, turning towards her son. Her voice was delicate, clear as a single drop of dew in a crystal cavern.

"I've made a new friend!" Kurogane announced.

"Oh?" asked his mother.

"His name is Fye."

+

"Mother tells the _best _stories," Kurogane told Fye once, clinging happily to the edge of a tree branch as it bobbed up and down.

"What kind of stories?" asked Fye.

"_Adventure _stories." Kurogane grinned. "I wanna be just like the warriors she tells me about, the legendary ones that kill all the evil monsters and save the world!" Opening his mouth wide, he took a mouthful of leaves and shook his head from side to side, baring his teeth. "Grrr!"

"You're going to fall off," Fye observed matter-of-factly as Kurogane lost his grip. He flailed wildly for several seconds and tumbled down in a cloud of leaves. "You should sit closer to the tree trunk."

Kurogane shook his head to free the clinging leaves. One fell on his nose and he sneezed.

"What d'_you_ wanna be, then?" he asked, annoyed.

Fye answered without hesitation. "A computer scientist! Like my ma." He did not quite know what 'computer scientist' meant (the words brought up confused images of numbers and dissection with a scalpel), but it sounded big and important and he had always known he was going to follow in his mother's footsteps. He glowed at the thought of it.

+

Kurogane lost faith when he turned twelve.

"There are no monsters to fight," he complained. "How can I protect Mother from monsters if no monsters attack her?"

"Killing monsters isn't the only way someone can be helpful," Fye pointed out, eyes half-closed. He was sprawled out on the grass, and the afternoon sun shone warmly down upon his small figure.

"Well, what else am I supposed to do?" demanded Kurogane. He whacked at a rock in front of him with a tree branch.

"I dunno," said Fye. "I'm sure there's something." He rolled onto his back and put his arms behind his head. "What's your dad off doing all the time?"

"Business," Kurogane growled. His branch broke in half and he tossed it away.

Fye had seen Kurogane's dad once. He had black hair and red eyes and looked exactly like Kurogane, except bigger. Kurogane had gone for him like a small black bullet, and they had tumbled to the floor in a tangle of hair and arms and laughter. When they finally disentangled themselves, Kurogane's father had grinned and ruffled his son's hair. He ruffled Fye's hair too. Then he left again.

"Why don't you do business too, then?" asked Fye.

"No. Ew." Now that Fye thought about it, he wasn't sure he could see Kurogane as a businessman – except the fact that his father was living proof of it. Not that his father looked much like a businessman either.

"Business is corrupt," Kurogane added. "Father told me that himself. He's only in it for the money."

"Well, money's kind of important, isn't it?" asked Fye drowsily. "More useful than monster-killing."

"Hn." Kurogane grunted.

"You'd need it for your ma," Fye added. "I mean, th- tha's like-" he gave a great yawn. "Like what your dad's doing, yeah?"

Kurogane looked intrigued.

+

Fye lost the sight in his left eye when _he _turned twelve. It was not a sudden thing – it had been slipping away from him, bit by bit, drop by drop, for the past several years. But it completely deserted him on his twelfth birthday.

"And you never saw a _doctor _about it?" asked Kurogane incredulously.

"Did too!" protested Fye. "None of them could find anything wrong. And most of them said it was probably temporary."

The blindness really messed with his depth perception. More than once he knocked his head on the doorframe going out of the house, and just as often walked into people he had judged a fair distance away. Craning his head around was the only way he could see anything on his left side, and he was unaccustomed to it.

Kurogane became his missing eye.

"Watch it!" he'd shout, and Fye learned to halt as soon as he heard the words; stop, or take a small step back before he hit something or someone. Sometimes it was "Left!", and he would step to the right to avoid what was on the left, then turn to see what it was. It was a system, one of mutual trust, and it worked.

It lasted about three months.

+

"Are you sure you want me to do this, darling?" his mother asked hesitantly. "I can't guarantee success, and it will most certainly be painful."

Fye thought about it. An eye was better than no eye, real or not.

"Yeah," he said.

+

The operation was painful. His mother had not lied. Lying face up on the bed, he could feel the pain coming and going in waves. It was red, sometimes white, and once flashed purple before his eyes. They gave him drugs – not the official anesthetics, because this was not a formal medical operation – but enough to dull the edges of the pain. It also had the curious side effect of warping his awareness. He floated into his own body, within his pain and yet not of it, drifting past dreams and reality, hallucinations and truth, hovering in murky waters where one was not distinguishable from the other. Sometimes his eye flared, and he knew the flames had got it, saw in his mind how it flickered and blazed in the empty socket. Other times it merely hurt, and he wanted to reach up a hand to touch and ease the pain, yet was repulsed by the sheer idea. Then there were times when he had no eye at all, and felt the hole in his face as jagged and ugly as the one in his heart, shot through and gaping wide open.

Figures passed to and fro about his bed. He saw them dimly, grey silhouettes with no real shape to speak of. Often he thought he saw his mother, bent over him with a sorrowful look on her face. Once or twice he thought he glimpsed someone else with her, a man, but he could not turn his head to see more clearly. Cold hard metal held it in its place.

Kurogane was there too. Sometimes he would wake up and there he stood, red eyes frowning down at him, lips pursed in a hard line. Other times there would be no one. Too often in his fevered dreams he saw himself standing next to Kurogane, both eyes intact and blue as the sea is blue. In his mind's eye he made the two of them speak, converse in low tones to each other and gesticulating occasionally to the person on the bed. And the person on the bed wasn't him, no, it was just some other person, any person, it couldn't be him because he was standing right there, next to Kurogane, hale and healthy as any other boy. He was. He _was_. The dreams were so vivid he could almost believe them real, could almost reach out to them with his hand and touch them, whispering, "Fye…"

Then he would wake up again by himself. And the cold metal held him as they did things to his eye and to his head, and he would squeeze his other eye shut and hope that it would all end soon.

+

That, Fye later reflected, was what ended up prompting him to go to his mother and _really _learn his trade. The mechanical eye. It amazed him like nothing else ever did.

"It's kind of creepy," Kurogane observed. "It looks just like a real eye."

"Works like one too," Fye told him, trying it out. Aside from a slight coolness that his eye socket quickly adjusted to, it supplied sight just as well as his old eye. Better, even. If he shut his right eye, the world became more jagged and pixelated, but with both eyes open it seemed to work just fine.

"Does it hurt?" Kurogane asked curiously.

Fye blinked several times. They had kept his eyelid intact (obviously, as it did not need replacing), and, aside from the unnatural coolness, he did not feel anything.

"No," he decided. "It feels weird, but it doesn't hurt."

"Wow." Kurogane was in awe. "I wish my mom were a computer scientist. I didn't know they made _eyes_."

Fye had not known that either. It was part of the reason why, in the years to come, he began avidly looking into and helping with his mother's research, in the process acquiring a substantial amount of firsthand knowledge regarding the development of persocoms.

Kurogane, affected by Fye's newfound enthusiasm for research, eventually began (of all things) to read books. He wanted to find something useful to do when he grew up, he proclaimed, so he could support his family. Somewhere along the line, someone had instilled into him the idea that anyone who was beneficial to the "real world" had to read lots and study hard. For the longest time he eyed the inscrutable volumes with distaste. Then he tied a red band around his head and began attacking the dusty tomes as savagely as he once attacked imaginary monsters in the woods. Gradually he even came to enjoy his studies. A little.

So things went, and so time flew. And all was well.

Until the day everything fell apart.


	3. Chapter 3

"I felt it as soon as I woke up that day," Fye told Minoru. "Something'd _gone_."

The little boy looked at him with large black eyes and sipped at his soda.

"I could feel it in my bones," Fye added. He picked up the glass with his long, tapered fingers and studied it for several seconds, then threw his head back and drained the remaining liquid in one gulp. "I couldn't say what it was exactly," he continued, setting the glass back down with a small chink, "but something was… was missing." He leaned back a little and closed his eyes. "Like someone had cut a part out of me," he sighed. "And- just left the hole there, raw and gaping wide with cold air blowing through..." He shivered and reached for the bottle.

"You shouldn't drink so much," Minoru observed, as Fye poured himself another glass of sake. "You'll damage your liver."

The blond head snapped up, blue eyes narrowing. The boy held his gaze steadily. After several seconds, Fye laughed, relaxing back into his seat.

"Trust me," he said lightly. "I've been places much worse than this." Almost lazily he swirled the liquid in his cup and brought it to his lips. "I know how much I can take."

Your words are beginning to slur, thought Minoru. He sipped his soda and stared at the yellow Duklyon logo on the window. Across from him, Fye seemed to have taken it for granted that the conversation was over. The glass chinked as he splashed more of the clear liquid into his cup. The boy looked away.

Low thrums of conversation floated past from other late-night customers. Somewhere, an old man wheezed with laughter, reliving college memories with an old friend. Just three seats behind them, a couple was curled up together, murmuring sweet nothings into each other's ear. Far away a group of teenagers laughed raucously, half-drunk.

Minoru started when Fye suddenly spoke.

"It's silly, isn't it?" he asked, gazing at an empty patch of air to the left of the little boy's head.

Minoru shrugged, though he was fairly certain Fye did not see him.

"I, I could have sworn," Fye continued, "when I found him that day, found him, thought everything was gonna be all right-"

Minoru didn't know who 'he' was and didn't ask.

"-he was _wrong_ too. He was, everything was wrong, like the world was just a little bit off but you couldn't quite put your finger on it, and when he said 'Fye' it was wrong, all reluctant, like he was spittin' out something vile he didn' want to say, then, then I _knew_." Mechanically he picked up the bottle, drank from it, and set it back on the table again. "The world'd gone bad and I didn' know why."

Minoru felt as though he should say something, but he didn't think Fye was talking to him any longer and besides, he had no idea what to say. A waitress swept by them, gave Minoru a smile, and moved on, repeating, 'it is now eleven twenty, the cafe will close in ten minutes, it is now eleven twenty, the cafe will close in ten minutes.'

"I have to go soon," said Minoru. "My sister will be worried."

Fye lay half-slumped on the table, fingers curled around the bottle neck, and did not appear to hear him.

"F," Minoru repeated, louder. "I have to go."

"Nnnnngh?" groaned Fye.

The little boy's mouth twitched in a half-smile. "I'm going," he said, and jumped off his chair. Fye lifted his head and watched his retreating figure for several seconds before falling back onto the table.

"I started it," he mumbled into the wood. "Di' I ever tell you that, Fujitaka? Not you, not _an'one_. I li' the match, the match..."

That was the most Fye ever said about his past, and they never broached the subject again.

However, Minoru thought he found out who 'he' was several months later, when Fye left him a coded message on BBS inviting him over to his apartment.

"You look very happy today," Minoru observed.

"Hmm?" Fye seemed distracted. "Happy? Oh, of course, of course. Come down and take a look at this, M-chan, I think you'll like it."

Minoru followed him into the elevator, taking in the surroundings with mild curiosity. He had only ever been here once, and then not for long. It was a very nice apartment – nicer, he suspected, than Fye could ever afford. The place itself was a gift from a man Fye referred to as Icchan, that much he knew, but who this Icchan was, how they were related, why he would extend himself so far on the behalf of a hopeless nutcase... he hadn't a clue.

The elevator dinged. The doors slid open. Minoru, despite all he had prepared himself to see, could not keep his eyes from widening.

Are those what I think they are? he wanted to ask, and How did you do this? and Do you know what you've _accomplished_, man? but those were stupid questions, and Minoru was sensible.

"Where are the cables?" he asked, examining the foremost figure. It looked, in every way, like a real human being. Even the ears were normal. "The connectors?"

"Ah, yes," said Fye. "I had a little trouble with that, in the beginning." He gesticulated toward the other end of the room, and Minoru saw a number of the bodies sprawled there with strangely shaped computer ears poking out of their spiky black hair. Some were still haphazardly connected to cables that strung them up in oddly limp angles, while others were half-assembled, nuts and bolts and memory chips strewn around them in a jumbled mess. "The prototypes," Fye added with a dismissive wave. "I removed many superfluous features in the latest versions."

Minoru did not hear him. His probing fingers had already discovered the minute catch behind each ear and eased them open. Gently nudging the figure's hair out of the way, he proceeded to explore the space with his fingertips.

Two connectors.

No ports, no drives, none of the elements common in even the most primitive workaday computers, just two small connectors, one behind each ear, and that was it.

"-'d finally got the personality chip _perfect_-" Fye was saying.

Those aren't enough to parallel transmission, thought Minoru, brows furrowing imperceptibly. Even if you adapted the right programs to hook up to it, the whole thing would crash from sheer lag. Which means whatever personality chip it has was programmed manually, tested manually, wired manually-

Minoru closed his eyes, then opened them again, exhaling slowly. He shook his head. Then, painfully aware all the time of how childish his experimentations on Blanche and the other angels now seemed, he pulled several folded sheets of paper from his backpack and handed them to Fye, muttering, "This section won't boot up properly and I can't figure out why."

Fye blinked as though coming out of a reverie. "What?" he said. "Ah..." Absently he took the sheets from Minoru and began scanning the lines of code. "Look here," he said after a minute, "change this 'for' to a 'while.' You can't set a 'do' function with a 'for,' it won't read. And you're missing an endtag here, but I don't think that registers, so it doesn't matter. Why don't you use a loop here, though, it would save you all those embedded repeats..."

In the days to come Minoru would often think back on that day in the basement and the absent tender look on Fye's face as he scanned through the lines, seeing but not really seeing. What is it, he wondered, what is it that made a man look like that, hollow but not hollow? What power could there possibly be to empty a man out like that, drain him like a flask of water and leave him there, stuffed full of little bits of lies and little bits of laughter but really nothing, nothing, nothing...

Minoru sat and thought about these things, a little boy in a house too big for him with eyes too black and too deep for his own good. But his sister called to him, and he went to her.

"What were you thinking about?" she asked with a warm smile.

"What to eat for dinner today," he said, taking her hand.

"Oh, really?" She sounded genuinely pleased. "I was thinking about making some sukiyaki tonight-"

"I love sukiyaki!" And he really meant it.

"All right. Sukiyaki it is, then." She smiled.

"He... helps out around the house." Fye stood there, his smile helpless and awkward and a little lost. "Just, you know, with chores and stuff."

Minoru blinked, but did not say anything. Instead he turned his back on the black-haired figure he had seen lifeless in a laboratory only a month ago and carefully consulted Fye on a variety of technical questions.

"How was the match today?" he asked his sister.

"Oh!" she said. "Blanche was roughed up quite a bit, the poor dear. You'll have to take a look at her when you have some time. Sai and Shirahime had a fairly rough match as well..."

"I heard Sai was doing well..."

"Yes, yes indeed she is. They're calling her the Ice Machine now, did you know that?" She giggled, and Minoru laughed with her.

"The Ice Machine and the White Princess. What a combination."

"Oh, I know..."

"I've got the algorithm down for the workaround now. If all goes well, Blanche should be able to snap into a sort of hyper mode that will maximize both speed and strength during battle."

"It won't hurt her, will it?" She turned to him, and for an instant her loose brown braids framed the worry in her eyes.

"No, of course not." He smiled, genuinely pleased to be telling the truth.

"All right." She gave him a hug.

Minoru had bad dreams at night. Fye's face came back to plague him, wearing that helpless smile and irrevocable look of tenderness. It sickened him. He felt as though he was not looking at a man but half a man, a ghost, a translucent shell of nothingness, and it made him so sick he wanted to cry.

In the beginning it had been better. Kurogane (for that was how Fye introduced him) was always there, but their discussions were mostly technical and often he was neglected as Fye enthusiastically tried to explain some complicated precept or the other to Minoru, delighted in the existence of a mind as sharp as his own. As time wore on, however, the discussions dwindled. Fye laughed less, joked less, talked less until Minoru could hardly get a word out of him without prompting with a question. And then he had the strangest sensation that all the responses were merely a reflex, an echo of all that this blue-eyed man had learned over the years, and that the heart, the soul behind the words had gone somewhere he could not follow.

Again and again he saw in his dreams that first twisted panorama when the elevator dinged and the door rolled open. His eyes widened. The basement stretched out before them. To the right, the left, above, below, everywhere the same face mirrored itself over and over again, some with eyes closed as though sleeping, others with eyes open, sightless, staring vacantly out into nothing at all. The same rough hair, the same red eyes... echoes in echoes, mirrors in mirrors in mirrors until they all shattered into a million gleaming pieces and he was so dizzy he wanted to puke.

He woke to his sister clasping his hand. He looked to her and she smiled, and he smiled gratefully back, giving her hand a little squeeze.

And then without warning his sister was gone, poof, like a firefly winked out of existence. From the time the doctor gave the bad news to the moment she died it could not have been more than five days, and it happened so suddenly he did not even have time to cry. He held onto her hand and all he could see was her face, her smiling up at him, her smiling on her deathbed, her smiling at him even as she grimaced in pain and cried out from the disease working its way through her body.

All her friends wept at the funeral but he could not; he stood with his eyes downcast and willed the tears to come but felt only a profound blankness, a sense of unreality.

And so he returned.

"Look, M-chan!" Fye cried. "We went shopping today!" He was wearing a dressy white shirt with the collar flipped up and the buttons loosened, and beside him Kurogane wore the equivalent in black, with the addition of a red sash flipped over his shoulder.

"Who are you?" growled the black-haired persocom, eyeing Minoru with distaste. "Little twerp!"

"Hey, hey, be nice," Fye scolded. "I'm sorry," he explained to Minoru, "he tends to forget things. Got a bit of amnesia, like."

Two months ago Minoru would have turned and left. Two months ago he would have felt ill at the sight of them. And he still did. But somehow, at the same time, there was a little dark spot in the cracks of his heart that envied them their happiness. Somewhere there was pity, but pity hit himself like a battering ram because if they were on the verge of drowning why then he was in the water, and oh, it hurt to breathe.

He looked at them and thought of his sister, sitting in front of the mirror and braiding her hair. His sister, smiling. His sister, hugging him and whispering soothing words into his ear.

His sister, gently ruffling his hair when she got home. His sister, holding his hand on the way to the beach, talking and laughing about all the inconsequential things. His sister, sitting him down and telling him earnestly, earnestly that they were on their own now, they had only each other now, the world was big and the world was deadly but as long as she was there she would protect him, okay?

Kaede, Kaede, Kaede.

And finally the tears splashed down his face and onto his chin, and he stood still and let them fall.

Somewhere, someone called to him. M-chan! M-chan? Someone lead him to a table and sat him down, where he put his head in his arms and kept crying, shoulders shaking uncontrollably. Somebody was saying something to him but he couldn't make out the words, couldn't hear through his own chattering teeth.

"-ong? What's wrong? What's wrong, M?" Fye's face hovered in and out of focus like a flickering candle, and behind him, behind him –

"How long will your happiness last?" Minoru asked bleakly, a single tear sliding down his cheek. "How long can you keep this up? How long will _he_ l-"

He stopped, because something had broken in Fye's face. It twisted in and scrunched up upon itself, and he opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. "I-" he said. "I, he-" The blue eyes flashed intermittent anguish, despair, then slowly, slowly calmed back down to normal again. "Why, amnesia," he said as though it were a new discovery. "He has amnesia, that's all."

Minoru nodded, then buried his head in his arms again. He cried not because Fye was a broken puppet after all, a marionette with a wax doll smile twisting and cutting its own strings, but because he knew that he would never be able to delude himself even that far, and that he would try anyway.


End file.
